The First Global Chinese Influencer Festival

The day Macao stopped being a stopover and started being the doorway.

In August 2026, Macao hosted the inaugural Global Chinese Influencer Festival — the first edition of what its organisers intend to be an annual gathering. The festival sits in the same year the world marks the 160th anniversary of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's birth — and the closing-remarks speaker, Sean Own, President of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Electronic Commerce Association, used that coincidence on purpose.

"A young Sun Yat-sen first left China from Macao by ship, bound for Honolulu," Own said. "Macao was his gateway to the world — the place where he first encountered the world and began the work of carrying Chinese spirit outward. He called on Chinese communities across oceans to unite. He knew that the Mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese — all of us are one community of shared national destiny."

This is the first edition of the Global Chinese Influencer Festival — and the emotion of that matters, Own said. He thanked the festival's chief strategist — widely known as "History Bro" — and called for the gathering to be made annual: Macao as a permanent cross-strait platform for new-media creators, year after year.

Two things the day was really about: Macao as a new gateway for Chinese culture going global — and cross-strait youth working together, not apart.

The policy backdrop behind the festival.

Own framed the festival against a wider policy backdrop. Earlier in 2026, on 10 April, General Secretary Xi Jinping met in Beijing with Cheng Li-wen, Chairperson of the Kuomintang, and the delegation she led. Soon after, ten new Taiwan-friendly policies were released — and two of them, Own argued, speak directly to the work of this festival.

The four organisations that stood the festival up.

What Sean Own actually said.

• Cross-strait youth are family. "Cross-strait youth are one family, bound by the same blood. Co-operation and shared win is the only correct road."
• The Taiwan-investor track record in the GBA. "I have spent 25 years in the Greater Bay Area. I have watched generation after generation of Taiwanese businesspeople — 'the first to dare' — cross the strait, build Dongguan into the world's factory, and ride Shenzhen's iterative rise. That mutual benefit is the truest picture of cross-strait integration."
• Why Macao, specifically. "Macao carries the West-meets-East depth that no other city in the region holds — and it carries it because the Central Government gave Macao the positioning of 'one centre, one platform, one base.' One of those — one base — is the base for exchange and cooperation built on Chinese culture as the mainstream, with diverse cultures coexisting. The GBA's future has always had a place for Taiwan's youth in it."
• The window the policies just opened. "Mainland China and the two SARs are accelerating high-quality development — Chinese-style modernisation, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. For Taiwanese businesspeople, Taiwanese compatriots, Taiwanese firms — the opportunity is real. The digital economy, the wave of AI, and a new age of internet exploration have all arrived at once."
• What the Association will keep doing. "Rooted in Macao, anchored in the Greater Bay Area, the GBA E-Commerce Association will keep building the International Communication Base for Chinese Culture — and keep pushing Chinese digital services going global. Unity, exchange, service, development. That is our charter."

Delegates, organisers and new-media creators gathered at the First Global Chinese Influencer Festival, Macao, August 2026.

The line that ended the night.

Own closed with Dr. Sun Yat-sen's own last instruction to the Chinese people — the same line Sun spoke on his deathbed in Beijing in 1925, and the same line that has been recited by generations of Chinese patriots since. It is a line that, in 2026, the festival's organisers are betting will sound less like history and more like a working brief.